It is an honour to say some words today for Bob in the context of the loss we all no doubt feel.

I started to get to know Bob when I was a PHD student at University of Queensland where he visited to teach a course in the early 1980s. A number of us were keen to engage with his work. Like others I immediately enjoyed Bob’s warm sociable personality and interest in the research myself and other postgraduate students were doing.

Right from back then, before I joined the University of Western Australia (UWA) Department of Anthropology in 1986, I was becoming aware of Bob’s skills as a teacher and communicator. Student audiences loved him and he seemed to love them back. He greatly enjoyed the classroom dynamics of passing on his knowledge, typically drawing on his personal research background, to inform his thinking about scholars and studies in the discipline of anthropology. In 1988 Bob was among the first at UWA to win a university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award based on feedback from undergraduate students in his courses. Bob’s well known research fieldwork achievements in the eastern Pilbara region of Indigenous Australia were being read by many students.

During the 1990s and beyond Bob was in some demand as an entertaining lecturer on tourist holiday cruises through parts of Melanesia and he told me how much he enjoyed engaging with interested people about his knowledge of culture and history in the countries visited. This expertise arose from his early research in Vanuatu that was part of a larger study of resettlement in Pacific island communities and involved fieldwork that complemented his interests in Indigenous Australia. Bob contributed substantially to anthropological understandings of cultural change and continuity in Melanesia where engagements with Christianity emerged as quite different from the desert setting of his Australian fieldwork.

Bob’s Masters thesis (completed 1966) and PhD (completed 1972) were studies of traditional Mardu culture and patterns of intercultural relations between Aboriginal people and Whitefellas. His publications in both topics of study achieved considerable influence among colleagues in Australia, the USA, the UK and other countries.

In the Western Desert region of Australia, Bob engaged in his earliest fieldwork with some Mardu families who had not long ago moved from bush dwelling to life in missions and town settlements. Across Australia’s desert region there remained a small number of bush-based Aboriginal people and Bob was in a position to document their gradual establishing of a relationship with the wider world. What became known as a classic record of certain aspects of traditional culture occurred in 1965 while Bob was undertaking his Masters research with supervision from Professor Ron Berndt at UWA. Bob was included as an ‘anthropologist advisor and general assistant’ accompanying the documentary film maker Ian Dunlop on trips west from Alice Springs. He brought to the project an ability in speaking a dialect of the Western Desert language and was interpreter and translator contributing to the film outcome known worldwide as ‘Desert People’.

Bob’s book ‘The Jigalong Mob’, published in 1974, was influential in Australian Indigenous Studies including for my own research in the Gulf Country of north Australia. I subsequently benefitted as well from his support and critical comments as one of the examiners of my PhD. Bob was sought after as an examiner known for serious and productive intellectual engagements with the many PhD theses he both supervised and examined throughout his career.

From 1986, I joined the Anthropology Department at UWA with Bob having come from the Australian National University to take the Chair in 1984. He had returned to the academic setting from which his career had begun. Through the 1980s and into the 90s Bob undertook a reconditioning of the Department contributing to a strengthening of its influence in Australia and internationally. He was an energetic leader who negotiated many challenges in the changing university over the years leading up to his retirement in 2003. Together with his wife Myrna, whose anthropological research complemented Bob’s work with Mardu communities, he also facilitated rewarding social connections among staff, and postgraduate students, through kindness and hospitality at their home.

Alongside Bob’s influential academic studies and publications, he undertook important applied research, including Northern Territory land claims and a major project in the mid1990s with a formal engagement by the Royal Commission Inquiry into what became known as the Hindmarsh Island affair in South Australia. The Hindmarsh matter involved contesting groups of Ngarrinjarri women who had taken different positions on whether a bridge build would interfere with a proposed sacred area of lands and waters.

In 1999-2001 Bob took on the challenging task of preparing the expert anthropological report for the Mardu native title claim, involving translating Indigenous law and custom relating to rights in land into the language and concepts required by the Australian legal system. The report on which Bob was lead author stretched to more than 200 pages. He was unquestionably well positioned as an expert witness supporting the land interests of Mardu communities he had known since the 1960s.

Bob subsequently wrote academic articles arising out of such practical applied research, focused on complex issues of cultural continuities and changes and their implications for legal outcomes regarding Indigenous land rights and cultural heritage negotiations. His ability to retain linguistic competence in the Western Desert dialect, despite the interruptions to the circumstances in which he might speak the language, was enormously impressive.

Bob Tonkinson’s career-long contributions to anthropology will be celebrated into the future for many years I am sure. We have lost both a talented intellectual and of course a personal friend for so many of us who have known him and his work.